|
"Wow my performance from this PLC to the HMI has slowed down terribly. It was
working fine before. I guess the software must have a problem, lets call the driver vendor, must be his fault. Sound like a common scenario ? The software vendor
asks you "what changed, are there network traffic issues?" Do you know ? How do you know ?
If you have IntraVUE, you can know! Lets look at an example. In the screen below:
- We know our PLC is connected downstream of the switch at 10.1.1.170 at the bottom.
- Our HMI is over at 10.1.1.161.
- Notice the connection from the HMI to the router at 192.168.100.252 is green, so we're OK there.
- But notice the yellow between the router and the switch at 10.1.1.170 - something is wrong. Lets look closer.
Before we look at the event log, lets make sure we know which port on the router the switch at 10.1.1.170 is connected to.
Mousing over the connection will show that:
Here is the event log for the router. Notice the number of times that bandwidth thresholds have been exceeded on both ports 1 and 7 on the switch:
Lets look at the data for the connection to Port 1 which goes to the switch our PLC is on. Looks like a lot of traffic here.
But since the connection to the HMI showed a green line, which means it's OK, we better go look at Port 7's traffic next.
Here is the traffic data for Port 7 on the router. Wow - the system at port 7 is really tying things up. Logic says we better
find out of the system on Port 7 is talking to the PLC downstream of Port 1 to see if it is causing the high bandwidth consumption out Port 1 to the PLC switch.
Who is on port 7 ?
Right clicking on the device at 10.1.1.162 and selecting properties tells us who the device is and it's location, so we can now
go investigate further in the field.
Without IntraVUE, how would you have solved this problem ? Would you have obtained this information from your desktop this quickly ?
|
